Falling In Place

A Fool: If you don’t like it why don’t you make your own!

Publisher: That

https://underrealm.net/books

did you know

did you know we have a podcast now and you can literally listen to the books for free.

(You probably didn’t. That’s okay because it’s very new).

It’s slower than buying and reading them, but it’s great if you have no book budget but you do have some listening time!

I love the way the lily and the light in Piranesi’s glasses draw your eye. It creates a very clear line of focus that becomes almost like a connect-the-dots with the lilies in the water. The way Piranesi’s clothes kind of fade into the gray marble of the background really lets the viewer linger on and appreciate the warm lilypads in the foreground. By seeming to only draw the gaze to the plants, the piece is also sneakily framing the watchful eye of the marble Colossus, submerged in the water of the Drowned Hall.

The House watches; the House provides.

I also really like the softness of the uplight on Piranesi’s face. I feel like it can be very easy to go Too Far with an uplight, and make a character unintentionally menacing as a result. But there’s a softness and a simplicity to the render here that allows the contentment to really shine in his face. The expression is just so gentle and true to character.

There’s also such lovely attention to detail in the design of the character, from his glasses to his bare feet and his messenger bag and his hair baubles :’)

There is just something about seeing a bookstore on a rainy day...

B. They're not gonna talk to you, so any "business advice" you thought was gonna be worth more than $10mil, that's null and void, aint happening.

C. Here's the real secret of their "success"; they're all bad people. That's literally it. They're willing to lie, steal, cheat, bully, oppress, rape, etc to get what they want, and their appetites are never sated, so they never stop lying, cheating, etc. You don't get that kind of money through hard honest work. If you're willing to be a big enough piece of shit, you could easily be one of these guys.

Maybe its demographics, EFR instructors do tend to be older and less online, but there's been a shift from voyeur filming being seen as irritating and tasteless to actively harmful.

I met one lady who had an entire section of her lecture based on how to divide labor in emergency and one of those steps was crowd control. If you are taking charge of an emergency situation, you delegate tasks. Point at one person and tell them to call 911, Point at another person tell them to warn traffic, Point at another person tell them to get the first aid kit if you know where it is. You assign small tasks to individuals instead of asking a crowd that way the task actually happens, and you're not sitting around 20 minutes later wondering why the ambulance is taking so long to show up and it turns out that everyone assumed someone else called.

Now there is another step. Pick a big dude and tell him to stop people from filming. Which is actually the tamest version of what she said, because this lady went on and on about how phones are fragile, light, small, pieces of computer equipment that can be easily punted into oblivion.

And yeah, she's probably the most vocal proponent of property destruction in the face of voyeur filming I've heard lately but she's far from the only person in emergency services who's frustrated with the eternal quest for viral videos of strangers pain.

So let's talk about this for a minute.

First of all, how do you think Pride events fund themselves and stay free for attendees? O.o Vendor fees aren't all of it - a lot of money comes from sponsors - but like... we paid $1300 to vend at Seattle Pride this year. That's the money that pays the people who work to make Pride happen. That is not free. Pride as an event does not just magically happen. A lot of people work really hard to make Pride happen and to clean up after it.

We're a small trans-owned company and 100% of our employees are trans & queer. We jokingly refer to Pride as "Gay Christmas". The money we make during Pride means we stay open, Pride events get vendor fees, and our employees get paid for the rest of the year. This company does not exist without Pride events. The only reason we survived as a company during COVID is because my wife has a stable, good IT job.

This shit isn't free to do. It does not just magically happen. Performers need to get paid. Tech crew needs to get paid. Equipment needs to be rented for performers. Stages need to be rented. Electrical services need to be paid for so food can happen. Ice and water cost money. Trash pickup costs money.

A lot of people volunteer and donate, but festivals and big community events? They cost money, and the money we pay to be able to vend is part of how Pride events happen. Without that, small queer businesses like @nerdykeppie don't survive and the only people putting their money in to make this happen, AND MONEY NEEDS TO CHANGE HANDS FOR EVENTS TO HAPPEN, are Smirnoff and fucking Wells Fargo.

Rainbow capitalism is when uncaring corporations blast rainbow things on their products to get queers to buy them, while not actually doing anything to help queer people. Rich cishets getting millions of off a minority group.

Yo for real on Sunday night when I was guarding our stuff during load out so Evie and Emet could go get the van and all, I sat on one of the benches at Seattle Center & watched a flock of seagulls and a murder of crows flutter down and start picking through the drifts of trash left behind for stray French fries and bits of bread and other food. There was so much trash scattered across the ground.

And that's not... like... an indictment of queers in specific (though, truly, clean up after yourself) but that's just what happens when there are thousands of people in one place. People drop things and don't realize it, drop a piece of paper or food and then go "ew, it's gross now, I don't want to pick it up" or just don't give a fuck.

Someone has to clean that up. That costs money, because the someones cleaning that up deserve to be paid.

We're planning on going to a smallish Pride event in September in coastal WA. We'll pay $30 in vendor fees but we'll probably also drop a couple hundred bucks on sponsorship, bc that's us giving back to the community that supports us.

I think people don't always realise how tenuous the public funding and even corporate sponsorship for these things can be, especially in a climate of redoubled transphobia. We've already seen some big brands climb down or be ambivalent in promoting their own Pride collections this year.

Also, re: artists and makers and service providers: there is a ton of disability, neurodivergence and mental ill health across our community. It's not cheap being disabled, and yet contrary to the media stereotypes of well-heeled gay people, most community members I personally know are just getting by.

I know a lot of queer and trans folks who have jobs making stuff not just for the love of it, but because they can't rely on stable employment from organisations (and not just the obviously capitalistic ones - it's also the universities, and the health sector, for example) that may turn their logos rainbow in June, but maintain ableist hiring, disciplinary and firing policies year-round. I am seeing this dichotomy at work very painfully in the lives of loved ones at the moment.

Supporting disabled queer and trans artists and makers to pay their bills isn't rainbow capitalism, it's praxis, AND you get cool things to wear to Pride, which from what I've seen online this year, are often a lot more interesting from a design point of view, and more representative of intersectional identities, than the big brands' Pride gear.

The toddler doesn’t know Alexa is a name; as far as they’re concerned it’s a word that makes things happen. If the kid was saying “please play baby shark” it would mean literally the same thing to them because they don’t really understand language yet.

The maximum weight that a vehicle is allowed to carry on the Interstate System per federal law is 80,000 pounds gross vehicle weight (with a max of 20,000 pounds per axle). That’s 40 tons. That limit applies to every inch of pavement, not just the bridges. Since this is a known cap, a new Interstate bridge will be designed to accommodate an 80,000 lb GVW load on it. You could say the bridge’s weight limit is 80,000 lb/40 tons but that doesn’t really have much meaning, because a load higher than that would be illegal to transport on public roads anyway, and the road leading up to the bridge has the same weight restriction. (In practice, the bridge doubtlessly will be designed to have a little bit of let to it just in case some idiot tries to squeak by a few hundred extra pounds.)

Now, note that that law applies to the Interstate System only, because the federal government only has a governing interest in the Interstate System (and other roads that together make up something called the National Highway System) because they partially fund it. Most long-distance roads are owned and funded by the states. The states could theoretically set lower standard weight limits and/or design bridges with lower weight limits...but in practice they don’t.

One, because all of that 80,000 lb GVW traffic on the Interstate system has to go somewhere when it exits the system.

Two, because a group called the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO, who are best known for picking the road numbers) maintains a catalog of standard components for making bridges that meet Interstate System requirements. Engineers are expensive on a per-hour basis, so if you can direct your engineer to use standard components and make a standard bridge, that’s a lot cheaper than having them design a bridge from scratch to go over the creek in Nowheresville. As a result, most new bridges meet Interstate standards and have an 80,000 lb GVW rating even if they aren’t on the Interstate system. (This is also why all new bridges kind of look the same, but we’re not worried about how boring the bridges are for the sake of this post.)

So a bridge only has an explicit weight limit if it has been damaged in some way (through failure to properly maintain it usually) or because it predates the application of Interstate System standards and the standard AASHTO bridges.

Older bridges often have other problems in addition to the weight limits: many older designs are what we call “fracture critical”, which means that if one component of the bridge fails the whole thing collapses. Modern bridge designs have redundancy designed into them so that if one beam fails the other beams will carry the load until the damaged beam can be replaced. Older bridges also often don’t meet other standards, like height (16 ft clearance) and width (12 ft per lane plus 14 ft for shoulders) requirements.

Today I went to my favorite Italian restaurant and was seated at the table nearest the kitchen. We noticed a change to the menu. The list of pastas had been replaced by just "pasta of the day." We asked what the pasta of the day was. The waiter told us it was a mystery. So we ordered it, and when it came it was pasta with eggs and bacon, and I was so surprised and delighted by this unexpected whimsy that I started to clap. And then I noticed the chef watching me from the doorway and smiling. He had clearly come out wanting to see what people's reactions would be.

Tonight I went to a party and a woman asked me my name.

"Anna," I said.

"This confirms my theory," she said loudly, to the entire room. People stopped to listen. "ALL Anna's are drop dead gorgeous!"

I felt v flattered. I asked for her name.

She flashed me a grin. "Anna."

And then! At this parade! A very large beautiful man I didn't know! Saw me squinting! Said, "I'm can block the sun for you" and stepped in front of me. My sun-blindness cleared into a vision of his gentle smile.

He was a mathematics professor! Very sober, soft-spoken, kind. Did not insult my drunk friends but also stood carefully apart from them. The perfect balance.

Yes! This was a post about getting into the writing mindset.

I wasn't trying to share special memories or make a statement about the goodness of humanity (totally fine if that's what you got from this!). But this is a tool any writer could add to their toolbox: finding tidbits from life not merely through neutral observation but by observing the world through the lens of your own writing philosophy.